…and the honor they get in their home country after they’re safely dead, is here.
But there are some oddities. Among them: plainly the writer hasn’t been here for a while, as the Floozie in the Jacuzzi hasn’t been on O’Connell Street for — what? a year, or two? Or more? — since they removed her to make room for the Spire of Dublin. 
Other peculiarities: “Bloom’s Day?” Obviously this guy doesn’t even have the wee bit of Joyce-savvy necessary to know how the word (isn’t) punctuated. But probably most annoying to me is the way the article gives the impression that this celebration of writers is something Dublin’s just started doing, possibly as a cynical ploy for publicity….which is simply untrue. Where such commemoration happens, it’s meant with genuine affection. And probably as much to the point are all the places where it doesn’t, or didn’t happen.
Consider Jury’s Antique Bar in Dame Street, Dublin. In the ancient day, Joyce used to drink there. In the early 1970’s, Jury’s (then in the act of becoming a hotel chain as well as an owner of “licensed premises”) was preparing to gut the wood-paneled bar with its painted tiles and replace it with something more modern. The ornate paneling and brass fittings would have been sold for salvage: everything else would simply have been thrown away.
It took the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich — the place where Joyce fetched up for the longest, I believe, after leaving Ireland — to keep this from happening. Members of the Foundation raised enough money to buy the interior of the old bar, import it to Switzerland, and then prevailed on one of the Big Three Swiss banks (now UBS) to give the interior a new home in a bank building at Pelikanstrasse 8 in Zurich, where it could be recreated exactly as it had been.
There it stands now, as pleasant a place to have lunch or dinner as you could hope for…and with genuine Irish craic seeping out of the walls. When the crowd gets in there in the evening, it takes careful listening to the language to determine that you’re not in fact in Dublin. (The pub pulls a pretty good pint, too. — I know I have some pictures of the place around here. I should dig them up…)
